Genius Hour- Buddhism and Mental Health

It is time to discuss what I am doing for my genius hour project! Now you might be thinking, what is genius hour? Well it is a time where students explore a topic of their choosing and use their resources to answer their questions. This is all inquiry based and promoted self learning.

For my genius hour I chose to learn about Buddhism in modern psychology and how it relates to mental health. I know this may seem random, but it is a topic I have been wanting to explore for multiple reasons. The process of finding this topic was hard. I thought of many different projects, but did not know how to approach them. I finally found a great site called Cousera where there are free online courses from different well established universities. These courses do not count towards anything other than your benefit of learning something new. In this case I chose the course on Buddhism because it appealed to me the most.

Religion has always been a touchy subject because I really do not understand how people can follow only one practice when there are so many options in the world. Buddhism is not often talked about in schools and yet millions of people follow its teachings, so I wanted to know why. What benefits does this belief have that others don't? Will it improve my state of mind? Like most people I want control over my emotions, but is religion really the answer, or is it a separate  framework?

This week I learned out of all the Buddhist beliefs we are going to be focusing on scientific research that can help understand certain thoughts. The approach mixes a naturalist point of view with the scientific evolution of Buddhism. This could be good for me because it takes on a more secular point of view, although some may need that faith to help them with their moral orientation. Here are some key questions that made me become interested in this topic:

• Why do people suffer? 
• Why do we all feel anxiety? And sadness, and so on. 
• Why do people behave unkindly sometimes?  
• Does the human mind deceive people about the nature of reality? 
• And can we change the way the mind works? In particular, through meditation?

I have so many questions I want answered, and it is clear I am interested in this course. Hopefully I gain new insight and find some answers to my question. It is simple for teacher to recite information from textbooks, but the more you discover on your own, the more you will learn.


As a side note, I thought I would  share the professor's biography provided in Coursera, so you all can rest assured he is qualified to teach the subject. I hope you find my interpretation of his work to be helpful, but by all means I suggest hearing it from the man himself. Take a look at his course if this topic interests you!

About the Instructor

Robert Wright is Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. When he created this course in 2014, Wright was a visiting lecturer in Princeton University’s religion department and at the University’s Center for Human Values. He has also taught in the psychology department at Penn. He is the author, most recently, of The Evolution of God, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, which The New York Times Book Review named one of the ten best books of 1994, and Nonzero, which Bill Clinton called “astonishing” and instructed White House staff members to read. In 2009 Wright was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 global thinkers. Wright has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and his awards include the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism. Wright is the editor-in-chief of the websites Bloggingheads.tv and MeaningofLife.tv.